gambling and lubricity and all the other vices which drag men down by
the lower side of their nature because the higher side has nothing to
cling to, nothing to sustain it and hold it up.

What are you going to do, my brother-men, for this higher side of human
life? What contribution are you going to make of your strength, your
time, your influence, your money, your self, to make a cleaner, fuller,
happier, larger, nobler life possible for some of your fellow-men? I do
not ask how you are going to do it. You may do it in business, in the
law, in medicine, in the ministry, in teaching, in literature. But this
is the question: What are you going to give personally to make the human
life of the place where you do your work, purer, stronger, brighter,
better, and more worth living? That will be your best part in the
warfare against vice and crime.

The positive method is the only efficient way to combat intellectual
error and spiritual evil. False doctrines are never argued out of the
world. They are pushed back by the incoming of the truth as the darkness
is pushed back by the dawn. Phillips Brooks was right. It is not worth
while to cross the street to break a man's idol. It is worth while to
cross the ocean to tell him about God. The skilful fencer who attacks
your doubts and drives you from corner to corner of unbelief and leaves
you at last in doubt whether you doubt or not, does you a certain
service. He gives you exercise, takes the conceit out of you. But the
man who lays hold of the real faith that is hidden underneath your
doubt,--the silent longing for God and goodness, the secret attraction
that draws your heart toward Jesus Christ as the only one who has the
words of everlasting life,--the man who takes hold of this buried faith
and quickens it and makes you dare to try to live by it,--ah, that is
the man who helps you indeed. My brothers, if any of you are going to be